“…when the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8)

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Like putting a string across a football field

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I
have a policy in my office that every time anyone from my district actually
comes to the Capitol, they have a right to see me and talk to me, especially
young people. And I have, over the years, seen hundreds and hundreds, maybe
thousands of young people from my home district in southern California. And I
let them talk to me and ask any questions that they would like to ask.

And I have a question that I always ask them,
and I thought it would be interesting for my colleagues and perhaps any of
those who are watching C-SPAN or reading this in the Congressional Record
to know the answer that I get when I ask a question of the young high school
students from my district.

Mr. Speaker, when our kids come in to my
office and are talking to me, I note that I was actually in high school in
southern California 47 years ago. And I always ask the kids, is the air better
quality today, or is it worse today than when I was going to high school in
southern California 47 years ago?

And 90 percent of the students, over the
years, whom I've asked that question to have had exactly the wrong answer.
Their answer is, oh, you were so lucky to live at a time when the air quality
in southern California and around the Nation was so good, and it's so terrible
that we have to put up today with air quality that's killing us.

They've been told that the air quality when I
was in high school was so much better than it is today, which is 180 degrees
wrong. But this is a general attitude among today's young people because our
young people are being lied to. They are intentionally being given
misinformation.

Now, their teachers may not be intentionally
lying to them, but their teachers maybe are given information from scientists
and other sources that is an exact lie from people who know that, yes, the air
quality back when I went to school, and I go into description about how the air
quality was so bad at times we couldn't even go out on the playground. They
wouldn't even let us out of the classroom on to the sports field because the
air was so bad. Today that happens maybe once a year or twice a year in
southern California. Back then it happened once a week at times during the
summer and during the school year.

So our kids have this view that their
generation is being poisoned, and they're willing to accept stringent measures
in order to protect the environment that take away a great deal of the
opportunity that they should have in their lives in order to correct this horrible
problem that they're told that they've got.

Well, when I tell them it's just the opposite,
they're so surprised. Well, the truth is, our Nation's environment is no longer
the disaster that it was 50 years ago. And 50 years ago we did have a problem.
Fifty years ago I remember that when my dad was a Marine down in Quantico, when
I was a child I came up here several times and my dad would say, whatever you
do, don't put your finger in the Potomac River or your finger will fall off.
Well, it wasn't quite that bad, but it was really bad.

We've made tremendous progress over the years
on the Potomac River. I can't help but notice there are people water-skiing and
sailing and fishing in the Potomac now.

Well, we don't live in the same time of 50
years ago. The air today has never been cleaner than at any time in my
lifetime. The water has never been cleaner in any time in my lifetime than it
is today. And I am hopeful that my children will never have to experience the
pollution that was rampant when I was their age.

So, let's take a look and give credit where
credit's due. That progress is, in large part, because of the efforts of the
government, well, and the EPA, yes, which came in under President Nixon, and
others who have used science to fight for environmental reforms and to improve
the quality of life of our people.

And while I am thankful, I also would like to
heed the warning that President Eisenhower left with us in his farewell
address. And I quote, ``that public policy could itself become the captive of a
scientific technological elite.''

He was warning us about government-funded
research becoming so intertwined with public policy and the creation of
regulations it would compromise the integrity of both.

Well, in recent years, we've seen political
agendas being driven by scientific-sounding claims being used to frighten the
general public again and again and again.

[Time:
15:10]

An unjustified fear has been used, for
example, to ban DDT. I remember when I was a kid, and I used to run through
these clouds of DDT--again, when my father was in the military down in North
Carolina. Yes, it was killing millions of mosquitos in North Carolina, but when
they banned that DDT, I seem to remember it had something to do with the
thickness of shells of certain birds. Well, they banned DDT, and because of
that we have had millions of deaths due to malaria in Africa. Millions of young
African children, because they don't have a good diet, succumb to a disease
like malaria and die because of it. These children are dead--make no mistake
about it--because we were frightened into an irrational position on DDT,
banning that and thus destroying the lives of millions of children in the Third
World.

We've seen alarmism with ``The Population
Bomb.'' Do you remember that in 1968? It was a book claiming that increasing
populations and decreasing agricultural yield would lead to cannibalism and
global warfare over scarce resources by the mid-1970s. Here we are a long way
from the 1970s, and I'm afraid Malthus, who 150 years ago started this type of
scarism, was wrong, wrong, wrong. Right now, there are a lot of scientists,
unfortunately, who are molding themselves after the Malthus mistakes that were
made 150 years ago.

Today's environmental alarmists use faulty
and, in some cases, deceitful computer models to ``prove'' that the world is
being destroyed one way or the other, quite often, in the ones they've been
using in the last 10 years, of course, was that the world was being destroyed
by manmade carbon emissions. This is proven by their computer models, even
though the Earth has seen significantly higher atmospheric carbon levels many
times before. Those were not necessarily bad times for this planet, but those
computer models were suggesting, because of carbon emissions, we were going to
face a catastrophe. In fact, I remember very well the predictions of 10 and 15
years ago that, by now, we would have reached a tipping point in the
temperature of the world--that we'd have reached a temperature of about
now--and then it would go up 5 to 10 degrees, which is a big jump, but we
haven't seen that big jump.

The alarmists, of course, are not interested
when they make mistakes, and they're not really interested in solving real
problems. They are part of a coalition that wants to change our way of
life--that's their goal--with their computerizations showing that just horrible
times are ahead of us unless we change. The idea isn't to stop those horrible
times, because those horrible times are just a product of what they put into their
computers. Of course we all know what ``garbage in, garbage out'' means. If you
put into a computer that you're going to have some kind of disaster, that's
what you're going to get out of your computer, but what they have in mind, of

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course, and what they want to do is to change the way of
life--our life--which requires us to acquiesce, or better yet, they frighten us
into submission.

Make no mistake: manmade global warming, as a
theory, is being pushed by people who believe in global government. They have
been looking for an excuse for an incredible freedom-busting centralization of
power, and this global warming is just the latest in a long line of such
scares.

This was recently acknowledged by the
godfather of the global warming theory, a man who over the years has been given
such credit for laying the intellectual foundation and the scientific
foundation for the theory of manmade global warming. His name is James
Lovelock. James Lovelock, however, has changed his mind. James Lovelock now
concedes--and after a longtime dialogue with Burt Rutan, one of the great
engineers of our day--has come around to understand that he was not being totally
honest about things when he was accepting information that bolstered his
position, and was rejecting the consideration of other information. He has
changed his mind about the real threat that global warming poses to the
Earth--not that there wouldn't be any global warming but that it has been
totally exaggerated by the scientific community, and that he, himself, played a
major role in that exaggeration.

Dr. James Lovelock is in an article in the
Toronto Sun, which is entitled, ``Green 'drivel' exposed: The godfather of
global warming lowers the boom on climate change hysteria,'' which is what we
have been hearing over these last few years.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to introduce for the
Record this article that was just recently in the Toronto Sun, and I
would like to put this in the Record at this point.

[From the Toronto Sun,
June 23, 2012]

Green `Drivel' Exposed

THE GODFATHER OF GLOBAL WARMING LOWERS THE
BOOM ON CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA

(By Lorrie Goldstein)

Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather
of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he
acknowledged he had been unduly ``alarmist'' about climate change.

The implications were extraordinary.

Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and
environmentalist whose Gaia theory--that the Earth operates as a single, living
organism--has had a profound impact on the development of global warming
theory.

Unlike many ``environmentalists,'' who have
degrees in political science, Lovelock, until his recent retirement at age 92,
was a much-honoured working scientist and academic.

His inventions have been used by NASA, among
many other scientific organizations.

Lovelock's invention of the electron capture
detector in 1957 first enabled scientists to measure CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons)
and other pollutants in the atmosphere, leading, in many ways, to the birth of
the modern environmental movement.

Having observed that global temperatures since
the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate
models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, ``the problem is we don't know what
the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.'' Now, Lovelock has
given a follow-up interview to the UK's Guardian newspaper in which he delivers
more bombshells sure to anger the global green movement, which for years
worshipped his Gaia theory and apocalyptic predictions that billions would die
from man-made climate change by the end of this century.

Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global
warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions,
but says it's now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al
Gore's) were incorrect.

He responds to attacks on his revised views by
noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding
if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he's never been afraid to revise
his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that's how science advances.

Among his observations to the Guardian:

(1) A long-time supporter of nuclear power as
a way to lower greenhouse gas emissions, which has made him unpopular with
environmentalists, Lovelock has now come out in favour of natural gas fracking
(which environmentalists also oppose), as a low-polluting alternative to coal.

As Lovelock observes, ``Gas is almost a
give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way.
This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it .....
Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to
methane. We should be going mad on it.'' (Kandeh Yumkella, co-head of a major
United Nations program on sustainable energy, made similar arguments last week
at a UN environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro, advocating the development
of conventional and unconventional natural gas resources as a way to reduce
deforestation and save millions of lives in the Third World.)

``It just so happens that the green religion
is now taking over from the Christian religion,'' Lovelock observed. ``I don't
think people have noticed that, but it's got all the sort of terms that
religions use ..... The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens
are. You can't win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon
dioxide) in the air.''

(3) Lovelock mocks the idea modern economies
can be powered by wind turbines.

As he puts it, ``so-called 'sustainable
development' ..... is meaningless drivel ..... We rushed into renewable energy
without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and
unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price.''

(4) Finally, about claims ``the science is
settled'' on global warming: ``One thing that being a scientist has taught me
is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You
can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate
towards the truth. You don't know it.''

For those who are listening or who are reading
this specifically in the Congressional Record, I would like to quote
from that article now. That article reads:

Having observed that global temperatures since
the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate
models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, ``The problem is we don't know what
the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.''

The sign of a very intelligent person, really,
is to admit the things that he doesn't know. I mean I've always said I'm not
the smartest guy on the block, but I know what I don't know. Thus, when I'm
talking to people, I can have an honest discussion to try to expand my
knowledge. We've had too many people claiming that they know it all and that we
have to give up our freedom because they know it, and they don't even have to
engage in a debate with us over the details of something like global warming.

Let me know who has heard the words ``case
closed.'' I mean, 3 years ago, that's what they were saying here. What does
that mean? When you hear people in government and when you hear scientists
saying, ``the case is closed,'' well, that must mean there is going to be no
further debate on this issue.

I've been here as a Member of Congress for 24
years. Before that, I served in the White House for 7 years under President
Reagan. I have never seen a time when there was such an effort made to cut off
debate on an important subject than has been done on global warming. Never have
I heard over and over again people being told to shut up and that the case is
closed. Never have I seen so many research projects canceled because they in
some way challenged the theory of global warming. Never have I seen so many
scientists fired from their positions because they believe that the global
warming theory may not be accurate.

So what we need to do is to make sure that we
have an honest discussion of the issue, when even some of the promoters--some
of the people who have been the strongest advocates, like the individual, the
doctor, I just quoted--have changed their positions, if not totally reversed
them. At least they've been open to have said, We really don't know what we've
been advocating for these last few years.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to introduce into
the Record a letter from an esteemed physicist, Gordon Fulks. This is a
letter and some communication between this physicist and aerospace pioneer
legend Burt Rutan. I would like to put that into the Record at this
point.

June 23, 2012.Re Bravo on your courage!

DEAR BURT: I
think you deserve much of the credit for helping James Lovelock understand the
AGW phenomenon. You patiently provided him with the pertinent data and logic.
As with most of us, it took some time to digest the enormity of the necessary
shift in perspective. He had to give up a faith in the honesty of government
agencies and most of the scientists they are supporting.

For Jim Lovelock the transition apparently
involved two steps. That lessened the need for a complete about face. He first
figured out the Chlorofluorocarbon-Ozone Hole scam by discovering that some
scientists were cheating on the data, apparently to further their careers. He
probably also knew that the chemists who received the Nobel Prize for their
work had overestimated the effect by a large factor. It was not such a huge
step to then realize that climate scientists might be doing the same. But

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Lovelock, to his credit, wanted to be sure and took his time
examining the information that you and others sent to him.

My own recognition of what was going on was
likewise a two step process. During the ``Nuclear Winter'' scare about 25 years
ago, we redid Carl Sagan's original calculations to discover that he had
carefully chosen the inputs to his climate code to produce the result he
wanted. When we realized that a highly respected physicist would prostitute
himself to support his politics, his stature, and his income, we, in principle,
understood all the other scams of the post World War Two era.

From 1946 Nobel Laureate Hermann Joseph Muller
hiding evidence of a threshold phenomenon in human radiation exposure to
Rachael Carson promoting half truths about DDT, to unfounded scares about Acid
Rain, Ozone Depletion, Magnetic Fields, Global Warming, Ocean Acidification,
Diesel Particulates, and more, we have been victimized by continuous hysteria
that has led to disastrous public policies. Far too many scientists and their
fellow travelers have supported a grand bilking of American taxpayers for their
own selfish and political interests.

Many thanks for your efforts to convince one
very important individual to re-examine the logic and evidence. Now we need to
figure out how to avoid falling victim to these scams in the first place. As
you know, that must involve fundamental reform of the reward process that
funnels vast amounts of money to those who play along.

Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics),Corbett, Oregon USA.

Now let me read, in part, what that letter
says:

During the ``Nuclear Winter'' scare about 25
years ago, we redid Carl Sagan's original calculations to discover that he had
carefully chosen the inputs to his climate code to produce the result he
wanted. When we realized that a highly respected physicist would prostitute
himself to support his politics, his stature and his income, we, in principle,
understood all the other scams of the post World War II era.

[Time:
15:20]

Whoever looked up to Carl Sagan, and when they
realized he was cheating on the information and the analysis, they realized
that this was so widespread it was something to be concerned about. And I
continue:

From 1946 Nobel Laureate Hermann Joseph Muller
hiding evidence of a threshold phenomenon in human radiation exposure to Rachel
Carson promoting half-truths about DDT, to unfounded scares about acid rain,
ozone depletion, magnetic fields, global warming, ocean acidification, diesel
particulates, and more, we have been victimized by continuous hysteria that has
led to disastrous public policies. Far too many scientists and their fellow
travelers have supported a grand bilking of American taxpayers for their own
selfish and political interests.

That is the end of that quotation from that
letter to Burt Rutan from this world famous physicist.

It's clear that our current system, fueled by
the horrific waste of borrowed money, isn't working. Perhaps it's time that we
acted on President Eisenhower's warning and find a better way to separate
research and the creation of regulations. Otherwise, we will find ourselves
held truly captive with no access to inexpensive energy, reduced access to food
and water, and we might find ourselves also with none of our basic freedoms
because we've given them away because someone has frightened us into giving
away our freedom and giving away the opportunity for a better life for our
children.

Mr. Speaker, I am someone who is very
optimistic about the future. We have great possibilities. There are other
people who look to the future and think that the technological revolutions that
we have faced are actually a detriment to humankind. People did not live good
lives 100 years ago. As I mentioned, my father was a marine. Before that, he
grew up on a dirt-poor farm in North Dakota, as did my mother. In those days,
ordinary Americans did not live well. It was a struggle. The longevity of these
people was not that long because of the struggle they were in.

We need to make sure that we continue our
technological development so that we can have, yes, a clean environment, which
I have indicated was a product of the good technology and, yes, the research
that came from honest and hardworking scientists and engineers, quite often on
a government contract. But we need to make sure that we don't back off, because
we know there is a group of people in our society, and perhaps around the
world, who for some reason believe that back before the industrial age that
people lived better than they live today. Some of them have tried their best to
fight modernism. They have declared war, for example, on the internal
combustion engine. This global warming thing, that was the motive here. The
internal combustion engine is supposedly putting out carbon dioxide, and carbon
dioxide they believe is changing the climate of the planet.

I told you what I have asked young students who come into my
office. I asked: Is the air better or worse than it
was 50 years ago? I even ask Members of Congress and I ask people all the time,
the ones who buy into global warming, who are saying they're advocates of
global warming caused by mankind--basically the internal combustion
engine--what percentage of the Earth's atmosphere is carbon dioxide, is CO2. I hope that everyone who is focusing on
these comments now ask themselves how much CO2 there is, because CO2 is being
blamed for changing the entire climate of the planet. It would be an enormous
undertaking to change the climate of the whole planet, so it must be a pretty
good part of our atmosphere.

With that question, Members of Congress tell
me that they believe it's 25 percent. Some people say 10 percent. Others say 20
percent. I have never had a Member of Congress come anywhere close to what it
really is. It's not 10 percent or 20 percent. It's not 5 percent. It's not 1
percent. It's less than one-half of one-tenth of 1 percent. Have you got that?
It's not just 1 percent. It's less than one-half of one-tenth of 1 percent. Of
that, humankind is only responsible for 10 percent of that CO2. That makes it so minuscule that it would
be like putting a string across a football field and believing that was going
to create changes in the entire football field.

The fact that people are unaware, even at this
level, of how small the CO2 impact is
causes them to buy onto these scare tactics. This is a challenge for those of
us here because that threatens our freedom. It threatens us and our children in
being able to have the opportunities that we had and that we hope that all
Americans and all people throughout the world will have.

Let us go back on one thing. I am planning a
trip this year across the country, even though the gas prices are pretty high.
I'm hopefully going to drive across the country with my children. It's a
wonderful thing. What a wonderful vacation. We're going to have 2 weeks to do
it. I'm really looking forward to that. We're going to go in an automobile, and
it will cost us. The price of gas is up and I'm not a wealthy man, but we do
have this opportunity, and it's a wonderful thing.

What about 150 years ago? Did people have an
opportunity like this? No. What was the biggest challenge that we faced to the
health and safety of the people of this country 150 years ago? Or, let's say
just at the beginning of the last century, when we turned from the 19th to the
20th century. Do you know what it was? It was horse manure. Horse manure and
horse urine was enveloping our cities and the water and created health hazards
for people. And the flies and the stench and the internal combustion engine
came along, and it has been a great factor in providing health for human
beings. All over the world we got rid of the massive animal droppings that were
a threat to our health.

Also, there is the fact that we couldn't
produce a lot of wealth based on animal strength and we couldn't go on long
trips with our families and we didn't have a good quality of life, but the
internal combustion engine provided that for people of the United States and
humankind. There is no doubt that we have needed to improve the efficiency of
the internal combustion engine, and we have.

Here's the thought we'll leave with. In
southern California, when I was a kid, there was so much pollution--although
our young people don't know about that today. But today, when they think the
air is polluted in southern California, we have twice as many cars on the road
and we've reduced pollution into the 90s. It's probably 95 percent. This is a
tremendous accomplishment. And yes, some of the regulations that we have had
from the Federal Government have motivated this change. We need to accept that.
But we need to also accept that it is our technological advances, and it has
been not cancelling out technology for fear of

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things like CO2, which
are not a threat to our health. That's how we have kept America on an upward
course, even though we've been dragged down scare after scare after scare.

[Time:
15:30]

I remember when we had Meryl Streep come to
this Congress and testify about Alar in apples. What happened was, for 2 years
apple farmers went broke throughout the United States. There were thousands of
families who suffered because their product was not being bought because they
were afraid of Alar. What happened to that? Alar, it was found 2 years later
that it was all a scare. There was nothing to it. The same thing with cranberries.
When I was a kid, we couldn't eat cranberries for Thanksgiving.

The gentleman that I quoted here, that I
mentioned, who is the godfather of the global warming theory, James Lovelock,
he is also the man who discovered fluoro hydrocarbons, which gave people the
analysis of the ozone hole. Well, guess what? The ozone hole, as we have found
out--and as it was mentioned in passing there--the ozone hole was overrated as
a threat. In fact, it went away, and it's a natural cycle.

What we have had on this planet is a natural
cycle of weather, of temperatures, and that will continue. But what's happened
is, we've had people step forward, trying to create hysteria for their own
political ends, trying to frighten people into accepting policies they
otherwise would never accept.

So today, I'm hoping that as we
celebrate the Fourth of July, we, again, reaffirm that we will never give up
our liberty. We will never be frightened out of our liberty by foreigners who
threaten us with weapons, and we will not be frightened out of our liberty by
people who do not believe in the same type of freedom that we believe in but
are using scare tactics to create hysteria among our people that are phony
scare tactics to try to frighten us into giving up our freedom.

So on this Fourth of July, I hope we all
reconfirm that guarantee of our commitment in this Nation to freedom, to
opportunity for ordinary people so that ordinary people can live decent lives
with liberty and justice, prosperity for all.

Highlights

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Now I beg you, brethren, through the Lord Jesus Christ, and through the love of the Spirit, that you strive together with me in prayers to God for me, that I may be delivered from those in Judea who do not believe, and that my service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints, that I may come to you with joy by the will of God, and may be refreshed together with you. Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen.
Romans 15:30-33